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Football Monitoring: Proposal for 2003

Posted By: Stanford Wong
Date: 13 Jul 03, 6:33 am

What we did in 2002

Last year we had two volunteer monitors on SSB: Goats monitored all who posted NFL picks, and Maria Sharapova monitored all who posted college football picks. We had an NFL contest, using software from http://www.Castle64.com/fpool.htm. We offered a $100 prize, won by Stat with 59-32.

Monitoring picks manually is time-consuming. We cannot afford to pay someone to monitor manually. Eventually we probably will have our own software to monitor picks, but that software will not be ready by the time football starts in 2003. Fortunately there are multiple software monitoring options available on the Internet.

Last year we had two big problems with the Castle64 contest software. One is that Castle64 treated pushes as losers. The other is that on games for which no line was available early in the week, Castle used pick 'em as the line. I was able to correct the results to undo the effects of those two problems, but that required time I would have rather devoted to other activities. Our contest attracted 49 entrants, but each week fewer of them submitted picks. Only 17 entrants submitted picks for week 17. SSB received no publicity value from the contest.

Proposal for 2003

I have checked out several Internet monitoring and contest alternatives, and the best I have found is Wagerline.com.

One nice thing about Wagerline is each pick is graded according to the price available at the time you submit the pick. So for example if you think you will find a more favorable price closer to game time, you simply wait to submit that pick. You are allowed to pick a particular team only once per game.

Another thing I like about Wagerline is participating might be good publicity. The number of participants is huge; 5376 people made NFL picks on Wagerline in 2002. You can search for the results of anyone making picks on Wagerline. You can, for example, look up "Stanford Wong" and discover that I signed up but have yet to make my first pick.

My current plan is to submit my own picks to Wagerline starting with the NFL preseason. I'm willing to accept my Wagerline performance as being my official W-L record. Anyone else can do the same thing. There is no fee.

If others from SSB also want to be monitored by Wagerline, I will set up a contest so that the records of all SSB participants can be accessed together. I think that would involve submitting picks twice, once for the general Wagerline monitoring, and once for the SSB contest.

Wagerline says it will add a contest option of hiding a pick until after the appropriate game starts.

Currently I'm thinking of offering no prize to whoever turns in the best SSB performance on Wagerline. Last year's $100 prize seemed to put too much emphasis on winning, and caused participation to drop off as the season progressed. I've also heard that offering a cash prize will attract people who will submit picks merely in the hope of getting lucky and winning; I'd rather attract people who are participating solely for the purpose of establishing a monitored record.

By the way, had SSB participated on Wagerline in 2002, we would have done very well. Had Stat submitted his NFL contest picks to Wagerline using max bets, he would have placed 9th out of the 5376 participating. SSB would have had four of Wagerline's top 100 NFL pickers. Last year 4333 people submitted NCAA football picks to Wagerline; had Yosh and Colin submitted all of their college picks using max bets, Yosh would have placed #1 and Colin would have placed #7.

Stanford Wong

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Messages In This Thread

Football Monitoring: Proposal for 2003 -- Stanford Wong -- 13 Jul 03, 6:33 am
Addition to SSB guidelines for posting picks -- Stanford Wong -- 13 Jul 03, 8:12 am
sounds good -- ....The Real MT -- 13 Jul 03, 9:45 am
What line do they use?? (nt) -- Sean -- 13 Jul 03, 2:19 pm
Wagerline.com gets its lines from TheSportsNetwork.com -- Stanford Wong -- 13 Jul 03, 2:28 pm
usually its the same on up at the stardust (nt) -- ....The Real MT -- 14 Jul 03, 8:56 am

 


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